[Wikimedia-l] Re: Collection / Special:Book usage

[Juergen Fenn]

Dear Erik,
Dear list,

Am 22.04.22 um 21:35 Uhr schrieb Erik Moeller:
> That specific book is a good example of the problems that we've always
> had with PDF generation by way of LaTeX, such as complex tables. Also
> note the intermittent appearance of unsupported tags in the output.
>
> As far as I know, the renderer they use is still partially
> proprietary. I'm not sure if it would still be seen as valuable to
> open source fully, given that LaTeX is indeed probably a technical
> dead-end for these kinds of conversions, and given that the codebase
> is very old.


You might like to know that there is a more recent free
MediaWiki-to-LaTeX project that is actively maintained by Dirk Hünninger
and can be tried out on WMF Labs:

https://mediawiki2latex.wmflabs.org/

I understand that Dirk produced some PDF versions for German Wikibooks,
but I do not know whether he is still contributing.

I put Dirk in CC to let him know we speak of matters LaTeX. Maybe he
would like to join the conversation.

Best regards,
Jürgen.
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[Wikimedia-l] Re: The Wikipedia Library: Accessing free reliable sources is now easier than ever

[Juergen Fenn]

Well, Hathi Trust is not a good example, I'm afraid, because most
content cannot be retrieved from there in this country. However, some
open access aggregators have been added, most notably the biggest index
for OA papers on the web at https://www.base-search.net/ .

Regards,
Jürgen.

Am 19.01.22 um 21:19 Uhr schrieb The Cunctator:
> This is really well done. One suggestion that's probably already been
> made and may have various reasons for not including would be to add some
> of the non-paywalled libraries (like HathiTrust and the Federal
> Register) as searchable options.
>
> On Wed, Jan 19, 2022 at 12:10 PM Sam Walton  > wrote:
>
> Hi all,
>
> We've just published a blog post summarising the new features and
> functionality available to active Wikipedia editors in The Wikipedia
> Library: 
> https://diff.wikimedia.org/2022/01/19/the-wikipedia-library-accessing-free-reliable-sources-is-now-easier-than-ever/
> 
> 
>
> The Wikipedia Library is a tool providing active Wikipedia editors
> with free access to otherwise-paywalled resources, including
> journals, books, newspapers, magazines, and databases. Over the past
> 5-10 years the library has built up a large collection of content
> from a wide range of publishers.
>
> In the past couple of years we've been finalising the centralised
> Wikipedia Library tool used for accessing all this
> content: https://wikipedialibrary.wmflabs.org/
> . I'm really pleased to
> announce that we've finished work on some long-requested and planned
> features which make it really simple to use!
>
> The library now has:
>
>   * Proxy-based authentication for direct access of resources
> without a secondary login
>   * A centralised search feature for browsing multiple collections
> from one place
>   * An on-wiki notification to let editors know about the library
> when they have crossed the eligibility threshold (rolling out in
> stages throughout January)
>
> As the project I first joined the Wikimedia Foundation to work on
> years ago I'm personally thrilled that we've finally been able to
> deploy all these features!
>
> If you're eligible to use the library (500+ edits, 6+ months
> editing) you can jump in and start using the library straight away.
> We're now working on expanding and diversifying the content
> available in the library, so let us know on the suggestions page if
> there are collections you want us to make
> available: https://wikipedialibrary.wmflabs.org/suggest/
> 
>
> If the tool isn't currently localised into your language, you can
> translate it on
> TranslateWiki: 
> https://translatewiki.net/wiki/Translating:Wikipedia_Library_Card_Platform
> 
> 
>
> We're planning to host some Office Hours, which will be a chance to
> get a walkthrough of how to use the library, as well as discuss your
> research needs and requests for new collections with the team. Look
> out for more on that in the coming weeks.
>
> --
> Sam Walton
> Product Manager, The Wikipedia Library
>
> swal...@wikimedia.org
>
> 
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[Wikimedia-l] Re: Are we losing our readers?

[Juergen Fenn]

Thanks, James. I think this is an important point. So we could say we
have lost a part of acedemia.

More to the point, we seem to have failed to integrate course materials
and multimedia formats into Wikipedia articles.

Could we try and create some of these and integrate them into articles
relevant to students in oder to test whether this makes a difference to
them? Or do you think they would stick to Osmosis etc. anyway?

Best regards,
Jürgen.

Am 08.01.22 um 00:38 Uhr schrieb James Heilman:
> With respect to some anecdotal evidence, I have for many years asked the
> medical students who work with me on their clinical rotations how they
> study. I get a few passes through my department a month.
>
>  Most reported using Wikipedia 5 to 10 years back. Now sources like
> Osmosis, which are basically short video overviews with questions banks
> attached, are more commonly mentioned. Video is becoming a more common
> way for younger folks to learn.
>
> James
>
> On Fri, Jan 7, 2022 at 3:55 PM Mohamed ElGohary  <mailto:ircpresid...@gmail.com>> wrote:
>
> "Is the traffic measured where content is read" would be a better
> way of putting it. 
>
> --
>     Gohary (ircpresident)
>
> On Sat, Jan 8, 2022 at 12:52 AM Juergen Fenn  <mailto:jf...@gmx.net>> wrote:
>
> Anders raised the question how this relates to "smarter"
> machine-created
> traffic. Do we know more about this?
>
> Best Regards,
> Jürgen.
>
> Am 07.01.22 um 21:45 Uhr schrieb James Heilman:
> > Have been tracking medical pageviews for EN WP for more than
> 10 years.
> > It appears our readership peaked around 2014, there was a bump
> during
> > the pandemic, and now the fall in pageviews is
> continuing again... This
> > despite much of our pageviews for medicine continuing to be
> related to
> > the pandemic.
> >
> >
> 
> https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Change_in_medical_pageviews_from_2009_until_2014.png
> 
> <https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Change_in_medical_pageviews_from_2009_until_2014.png>
> >
> 
> <https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Change_in_medical_pageviews_from_2009_until_2014.png
> 
> <https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Change_in_medical_pageviews_from_2009_until_2014.png>>
> >
> >
> 
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Medicine/Popular_pages
> 
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Medicine/Popular_pages>
> >
> 
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Medicine/Popular_pages
> 
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Medicine/Popular_pages>>
> >
> > James
> >
> > On Fri, Jan 7, 2022 at 11:09 AM Toni Ristovski
> mailto:toni91ehrl...@gmail.com>
> > <mailto:toni91ehrl...@gmail.com
> <mailto:toni91ehrl...@gmail.com>>> wrote:
> >
> >     Additionally, pandemic 2020 with a lot of lockdowns makes many
> >     people commit to different activities, among them starting
> editing
> >     on Wikipedia or reading more. Basically, in my opinion it
> is better
> >     to compare with 2019 numbers. Also, it will be useful to
> have some
> >     kind of survey about this which can give us a better
> overview of
> >     these data.
> >
> >     As I`m editor and admin on Macedonian Wikipedia, I was quite
> >     surprised that our Wikipedia actually continues to grow in
> terms of
> >     reading and having a stable editing base.
> >
> >     All the best,
> >     Toni
> >
> >     On Fri, Jan 7, 2022 at 6:52 PM Galder Gonzalez Larrañaga
> >     mailto:galder...@hotmail.com>
> <mailto:galder...@hotmail.com <mailto:galder...@hotmail.com>>>
> wrote:
> >
> >         There's another option: the 2020 pandemic lockdowns
> made a huge
> >         peak on views, so year on year, 2021 has worse results.
> >
> >         2022(e)ko urt. 7(a) 18:41 erabiltzaileak hau idatzi du
> (Anders
> >         Wennersten  <mailto:m...@anderswennersten.se>
> >         <mailto:m...@andersw

[Wikimedia-l] Re: Are we losing our readers?

[Juergen Fenn]

Anders raised the question how this relates to "smarter" machine-created
traffic. Do we know more about this?

Best Regards,
Jürgen.

Am 07.01.22 um 21:45 Uhr schrieb James Heilman:
> Have been tracking medical pageviews for EN WP for more than 10 years.
> It appears our readership peaked around 2014, there was a bump during
> the pandemic, and now the fall in pageviews is continuing again... This
> despite much of our pageviews for medicine continuing to be related to
> the pandemic.
>
> https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Change_in_medical_pageviews_from_2009_until_2014.png
> 
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Medicine/Popular_pages
> 
>
> James
>
> On Fri, Jan 7, 2022 at 11:09 AM Toni Ristovski  > wrote:
>
> Additionally, pandemic 2020 with a lot of lockdowns makes many
> people commit to different activities, among them starting editing
> on Wikipedia or reading more. Basically, in my opinion it is better
> to compare with 2019 numbers. Also, it will be useful to have some
> kind of survey about this which can give us a better overview of
> these data.
>
> As I`m editor and admin on Macedonian Wikipedia, I was quite
> surprised that our Wikipedia actually continues to grow in terms of
> reading and having a stable editing base.
>
> All the best,
> Toni
>
> On Fri, Jan 7, 2022 at 6:52 PM Galder Gonzalez Larrañaga
> mailto:galder...@hotmail.com>> wrote:
>
> There's another option: the 2020 pandemic lockdowns made a huge
> peak on views, so year on year, 2021 has worse results.
>
> 2022(e)ko urt. 7(a) 18:41 erabiltzaileak hau idatzi du (Anders
> Wennersten  >):
>
> When I look at statistics for mature wikipedias: en, de pl,
> nl they all
> show a decrease of views of 13-15% in last 12 months from a
> year ago,
> and number of active editors down 10- 20 % (with exception
> of en).
>
> Has this been analysed somewhere, are we losing our readers and
> contributors or is it mostly Google that access our info
> "smarter" not
> creating "views"
>
> Anders
>
> https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/de.wikipedia.org
> 
>
> https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/en.wikipedia.org
> 
>
> https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/nl.wikipedia.org
> 
>
> https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/pl.wikipedia.org
> 
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[Wikimedia-l] Re: 100$ million dollars and still obsolete

[Juergen Fenn]

Am 16.10.21 um 16:25 Uhr schrieb Yaroslav Blanter:
>
> In a few years, there will be tools for editing video. If by that time
> we are not ready to incorporate video at full scale to Wikimedia
> projects, we will be where AOL is now.


We already _are_ there. When we tried to relaunch German Wikiversity
almost ten years ago we sadly had to shrug and decline offers to bring
converted classroom scenarios to Wikiversity because Commons did not
accept mp4 videos and we could not include frames from YouTube where it
all happens. Period. That was the end of online learning with Wikimedia.
(Fair enough, there were more reasons why we did not succeed.)

BUT: When we incorporate multimedia content at full scale it should be
clear that Wikimedia is NOT YouTube. We won't accept everything. We need
high qualitity educational content. Only.

Regards,
Jürgen.
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] New essay on the ambiguity of NC licenses

[Juergen Fenn]

Am 12.07.20 um 10:40 Uhr schrieb Ziko van Dijk:
> So the problem of the NC module remains that many who apply it are not
> always conscious about undesired consequences,  while some who apply it use
> the module very consciously for a specific reason - e.g. in a hybrid model,
> to distribute content but not to share it, to reserve commercial use
> exclusively for oneself. I do not want to judge about this intention, but I
> imagine that it can become problematic when your goal is to build a
> knowledge *commons*.


As far as I remember, CC was not about building a Commons in the first
place. Rather, it was about hacking copyright law so as to make it
easier to share materials online and to prevent users from breaking the
law when doing something related to copyright. I remember a talk by
Lawrence Lessig a long time ago when he said a copyright law a
15-year-old does not understand is bad copyright law. His aim was to
change something about this.

I would say CC licences have failed for a different reason. Most users
still do not understand how to licence an item properly, viz., how to
use to attribution clause correctly with the copyright holder's name BY,
the work's title and the correct license according to the rules. This is
still too difficult for most people.

And, secondly, we have not become a nation of remixers because the most
important case or reusing materials is retweeting etc. on social
networks which, as we all know, will not do with free licences altogether.

And, thirdly, still no system has been established the really creative
people publishing under CC can make a living if everyone is free to use
and re-use their works. So the social question deems on the horizon,
stil, after so many years. Think about this when talking about the NC
clause.

Regards,
Jürgen.

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Next steps on Wikimedia Space

[Juergen Fenn]

Am 19.02.20 um 22:52 Uhr schrieb Yaroslav Blanter:
>> Quit trying to make us TwitFaceTube. The tools we already have work just
>> fine.
>>
> Apparently not if people go there en masse instead of using on-wiki
> channels.


Most people do not go to TwitFaceTube in order to publish something
about themselves, but they use the closed channels those services
provide. That makes a difference. On-wiki everything is public by default.

Regards,
Jürgen.

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] The wikisites looks like 1996

[Juergen Fenn]

Am 12.12.19 um 02:25 Uhr schrieb Strainu:
> There is also a
> question of opportunity: with less and less desktop users, it just
> makes more sense to invest in the mobile experience


Most authors still use desktop computers for writing articles or doing
maintenance work. Mobile is for readers.

Regards,
Jürgen.

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] FDC funds allocation recommendation is up

[Juergen Fenn]

2014-11-24 13:44 GMT+01:00 Ilario Valdelli valde...@gmail.com:
 The problem is that any change means change management.

But who was it that authorised which change? I would like to focus on
what makes sense, which means that any technocratic category just
won't lead us anywhere. In the end, what once was referred to as the
Wikimedia movement has become a strange lot of organisations that have
lost contact with the community of editors. The only thing that keeps
them together in the end is money -- which is a bourgeois trade of
old. And isn't it ironic that at a time when the German chapter
understood that it had to intensify links with the community and
partly already succeeded in getting back on track it is given less
money, severing the chapter from its peers. That's no way still to
empower the remaining editing community which is best served locally.
Cutting the local chapters short and poor results in less support for
editors, of course.

Regards,
Jürgen.

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Community RfCs about MediaViewer

[Juergen Fenn]

2014-07-10 17:53 GMT+02:00 Brion Vibber bvib...@wikimedia.org:
 Perhaps it's time to stop calling self-selected surveys of a tiny subset of
 our user base community consensus.

 The vast majority of our user base never logs in, never edits, and never
 even hears about these RfC pages. Those are the people we're making an
 encyclopedia for.

I don't intend to bother you when you are making an encyclopædia,
Brion, but if this is the stance the Wikimedia Foundation takes it's
time for me to leave the project. I expect the Wikimedia Foundation to
respect a community consensus. If you think you have another community
of crowdsourcing workers then go ahead. I won't tolerate this.

Regards,
Jürgen.

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] The British Library releases 1 million images

[Juergen Fenn]

2013/12/15 Katie Chan k...@ktchan.info:

 We plan to launch a
 crowdsourcing application at the beginning of next year, to help describe
 what the images portray.


 The images release contained no image-level metadata == One million
 uncategorised images == Commons community raise up in arms

It does not really make a difference whether you release a million
images without metadata to Flickr, or to Commons. It comes without any
metadata, so it cannot be searched (and images cannot be found) in
either case. :(

Regards,
Jürgen.

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Invitation to WMF May 2013 Metrics and Activities Meeting: Thursday, June 6, 18:00 UTC

[Juergen Fenn]

2013/6/7 Nicole Ebber nicole.eb...@wikimedia.de:

 [As it is a Google Calendar, you can embed it in any web page (there is an
 html code for that), or use it in your private calendar via csv / iCal]

I wonder how long this will remain to be so? There was talk about
Google lately  to close the free calendar APIs? So you might like to
use a free replacement instead.

 Warmest regards (yes, spring has finally arrived in Berlin!)

... and so it has at Frankfurt, too. It was about time ... ;)

Regards,
Jürgen.

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Wikivoyage project launch/migration update

[Juergen Fenn]

2012/10/17 Deryck Chan deryckc...@wikimedia.hk:

 I think Strainu is referring to languages that exist on Wikitravel but not
 Wikivoyage.

Probably a practical question: As Wikitravel closed the API in August,
there is probably no more data that Wikivoyage could rescue from the
project than now is available in Wikivoyage. If a language community
needs a fresh start in Wikivoyage it would have to begin from the very
beginning. In this case it would be best to go through Incubator.

Regards,
Jürgen.

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Wikivoyage project launch/migration update

[Juergen Fenn]

2012/10/17 Tomasz Ganicz polime...@gmail.com:

 Probably a practical question: As Wikitravel closed the API in August,
 there is probably no more data that Wikivoyage could rescue from the
 project than now is available in Wikivoyage. If a language community
 needs a fresh start in Wikivoyage it would have to begin from the very
 beginning. In this case it would be best to go through Incubator.


 So, the predictable effect will be that mid-size wikitravel language
 versions which did not moved to wikivoyage before August will rather
 stay on Wikitravel. There will be hard to find volunteers in these
 langauges ready to go through painful and time consuming process of
 incubator as there is already working wiki that anyone can join
 without any obstacles...

Maybe, maybe not. First of all, Wikitravel is to blame because they
hinder free content from being used according to its license. But
perhaps it would be possible to migrate language versions even though
to Incubator and then to new Wikivoyage proper.

Regards,
Jürgen.

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[Wikimedia-l] Protest against ACTA/Mexico in Spanish Wikinews

[Juergen Fenn]

FYI: Spanish Wikinews today bears a site notice in protest against the
Mexican government signing the ACTA agreement. It says: The internet
must remain free. The Freedom of the internet is in peril.

The Spanish Wikinews community has issued a press release on the matter:

https://es.wikinews.org/wiki/Wikinoticias:Comunicado_de_prensa_acerca_de_la_firma_de_ACTA_en_México

I think we should express our solidarity with Spanish Wikinews editors.

Regards,
Jürgen.

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